Lightening Strikes – Maidstone 15/01/2017

Well the New Year started in January for Cambridgeshire Canines taking 2 teams to Maidstone, visiting Lightening Strikes, the hosting team.

Due to always being oversubscribed Cambridgeshire saw themselves with two out of the four teams gaining entry and two on the reserve list, giving us the hard task of deciding who goes. After a club discussion it was decided that the top team (Canines) and a mix up team would go. The mix up team was made to help our founder dog (Merlyn) who is virtually retired, gain a few more points to his next big award.

Canines Millie Bailey Lexey Tally 9”

Coyotes Merlyn Poppy Sam Ruby Bryn 8”

The running order was issued and saw Jan down for measuring at 7.30am so an overnight stop at the Premier Inn was made! Second division saw us doing some ring party, third division (Division 5) Coyotes were racing. We then had a nice little break before Ellen was Judging with some ring party help and last division (Division 1) saw Canines racing.

Coyotes were the first team to race. They had an interesting first leg of the day, where our height dog decided to go for a wander around the boxes at the back of the ring. We found this highly amusing that the team we were racing ran all of their dogs and we had only just caught our height dog… ( have you guessed, yes it was a Jack Russell!!))

Racing only got better for this team and all the dogs went from strength to strength, Ruby was on fire putting in some very good times. Bryn one of our younger dogs was certainly enjoying himself and putting in some of his quickest times yet!

This team went unbeaten all day coming home with a 1st place rosette and lots of points for Merlyn, who now only needs 90 points, for his Pearl Award.

Canines were back again in Division 1, raring to go, gaining more experience for the youngsters and some team gelling. Seeded 5th in this division Canines were there for a bit of fun and some good old racing.

We didn’t expect to come anywhere in the division knowing the teams we were up against and we had a few early crosses throughout the day! Tina got a few rollers and some good start times in the morning, but by the afternoon had lost the plot and was struggling to get the 0.0…. times we all like to see.

Having said all of that, we did put the fastest time in first race of the afternoon that these dogs have seen 17.57!! and we still had room!!

We were all proud of the dogs racing, something seem to click and we won 3 out of the 5 races in the division, we don’t know how we did it but we thought we had come third in the division… What a surprise we had in presentation when third place was called and it wasn’t Canines, we thought they had forgotten us but oh no! We had only gone and come 2nd in our division!! Whoop whoop!!

The whole team were on cloud 9 for at least the week after racing!

We would all like to thank Lightening Strikes for hosting this tournament and can’t wait to see everyone again in February for some more fantastic racing.